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In the past few years I built an archive of video transcripts and comments, by scraping youtube. The project started as an analysis of the "why I sopped uploading" YouTube trend. The latter was quite fascinating, because it was signalling a strong contradiction within the Content Creator community. On one hand the exhaustion forcing creators to stop uploading. While on the other hand it showed the necessity for them to upload new material, therefore their struggle becomes content.
While "why I stopped uploading" was signalling labour fatigue, other trends started to appear among YouTubers, namely: "How much I earn on YouTube" and "I do not Dream of Labour". This tryptic of video trends became interesting because all of them knowingly (or not) were engaging various forms of political and social relation to labour. "why I sopped uploading" could be considered a form of strike, "I do not Dream of Labour" a refusal to be offer surplus labour. "How much I earn on YouTube" is politically ambivalent, as content creators have used this as way to both discuss the struggles of labour, as well as showing off the ease of wealth production.
This archive was intended to document the contradiction of media production within platform capitalism. Also to be the base for artwork(s) that would reflect to the labour condition of content creators.
Nevertheless, this project never became really public. This due to the fact that in order to realise this project the work of thousands of worker was taken without consent to construct an archive / artwork. A form of primitive accumulation that echoes the western understanding of data as raw material available for taking. This left an open questions: what to do now with this archive, given the unethical nature of its appropriation? This confrontation with the project’s own contradictions became an integral part for its further development in three additional projects.
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Recursions Of Capture: An assemblage of Archives
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Of Synthetic Clouds & Synthetic Oceans
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A Memorial for Content Creators
Recursions Of Capture: An Assemblage of Archives
This is a triptych of short videos created in Unity, each depicting a panda watching a sunrise, a sunset, and a starry sky.
The work constructs a new symbolism: reimagining data not as a resource to be mined but as a phenomenon to be observed from distance. Each video is accompanied by a short poem on this metaphor, framing digital abundance as something to witness rather than accumulate.
Of Synthetic Clouds & Synthetic Oceans
This diptych of web-based artworks presents two real-time shaders, one simulating an ocean, the other, a drifting cloud. Unlike data-driven practices that rely on extraction, these shaders generate their visuals through mathematical synthesis, rather than captured material. Here, the act of creation rejects the logic of scraping, proposing synthesis as an alternative.
Memorial for Content Creators
This digital monument renders three marble statues, that immortalize three viral YouTube confessionals:
Why I Stopped Uploading
I Do Not Dream of Labour
How Much I Earn on YouTube
A camera glides past them in linear motion, mimicking the scrolling through viral content.The statues stand as self-eulogies: creators documenting their own labour struggles.
This final project circles back to where all started: the YouTubers and their labour. And despite a possible ironic reading this final project wants to honour the work of the content creators.
This representation wants to echo what is often possible to see in various italian cities, monuments for those who perished while working, similarly here their gestures of struggle are frozen into digital marble statues.
